


the land of gods & monsters

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Careers (Hunger Games), District 1, Forced Prostitution, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-09-24
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s an open secret in the Academy, what happens to the victors who trade on their looks. She has borrowed from the Capitol, and now she must repay them in kind.</i>
</p>
<p>What might prompt two young and healthy siblings to follow each other into a death match they have no real hope of surviving? Some have posited that it was a toxic sibling rivalry. I think otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the land of gods & monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Because Jesus H. Christ, it is _so hard_ to find good fic about these two, even though they're SO endlessly fascinating to me! Let's hope they get the Seneca Crane Bump after the movie (you know, where minor characters played by attractive people suddenly get a ton of fic, because pretty?). Ugh, I just have so many feelings.
> 
> No incest here, by the way. Definitely a codependent relationship and abnormal brother-sister closeness, but that's all.

Red dress, cut as to be obscene. Silver lips and lashes. Blonde, so blonde, blindingly gold and silver with artificial tan skin and laser-white teeth, a giggle ending in a shark’s grin. It’s the uniform. This is how they made her. This isn’t her, this is an impostor, or at least that’s what she tells herself as the Capitol flacks dust her skin with luminizing powder made with diamonds. They aren’t real diamonds, mined in Two or Twelve; they’re the artificial kind synthesized in a laboratory. Created under tremendous pressure, under the watchful eyes of professionals. But they shine. She decorates herself with them every other night.

She hates the others who don’t have it quite as bad. Johanna Mason doesn’t have to wear the obscene dresses and the diamond dust. Her hair is cut in a sensible bob; her skin allowed to stay creamy and pale; her body unblemished by surgery and injections and thoroughly unremade. Cashmere knows this other girl is no one’s pet and no one’s prize. She’s made her name as one of those women who knows how to choke and beat a man halfway to death and all the way to ecstasy, and she’s terrifying, and Cashmere hates her even though she knows, on some level, it’s senseless. They’re all victims, but some are moreso.

 

*

 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

In One, in the Academy, she wore her hair pulled back and the loose uniform of all the trainees. They were pulled out of bed in the middle of the night to run drills and fire weapons and spar with partners and she shouldered it with aplomb because all she knew was that she wanted out. Her parents gave her and Gloss to the Academy, signed them away for a stipend from the Capitol and the notoriety of having raised an almost-tribute, and even though she never intended to go all the way in at the beginning – thought she’d go all the way to residential, then wash out before graduation and go into the military track instead – somewhere along the way, amidst the short films produced by the Snow administration that they watched once a week after dinner and the glamour of the Reaping and the screams of the citizens as the chariots came down the city center – that thought was lost.

Gloss is never as good as she is; she’s always the star. He’s brilliant. She’s better. He’s strong. She’s quicker. They room together. At night she can hear him crying. The thin, regulation pillow doesn’t muffle his tears quite enough. He’ll never see the Arena, she knows. But she might. And then, all of a sudden, the decision is made, and it’s gone from she _might_ to she _will_. 

 

*

 

In the Arena, her hands shake and her focus is singular. She can taste the blood in her mouth from where Two Girl managed to sucker-punch her in the face before Cashmere crushed her windpipe, and isn’t this supposed to be the end? The Girlie Games, as they’d go down in history; the ones where the Career Boys were wiped out early and it came down to a showdown between One, Two, and Four. But Two is dead now. Dark skin mottled with purple bruises. Not bloody enough. Hand-to-hand combat had always been her strength. Cashmere’s vaguely aware of a dull, throbbing pain in her side – a pulled muscle, nothing life-threatening. There’s only this. Only one left.

Four.

She falters, then goes to Two’s pack and pulls a knife from the side. Not one made for throwing, but for intimidating. It will have to do. She empties the pack of supplies and yanks Two’s canteen from its hitch, then ducks into the dull brown brush, not bothering to obscure her tracks. She wants to be found. She’s itching for the end to come.

When the sun sets she lets her guard down, and only then there’s a distinct crunching of gravel underfoot. Four Girl. She’s not like the other Four Careers, the ones who go into the program out of fear (the idea that they “might as well prepare” is their motivation in Four; the lack of honor inherent makes the rest of the Careers sick). She’s strong and broad-boned and during the interviews, Cashmere remembers this girl telling Caesar that she volunteered because when she was only twelve, another girl volunteered to take her place at the Reaping. The blatant, desperate pandering made the audience sigh and cheer. It made her sick. She laughs as she turns and draws back the knife and buries it in Four’s back in one swift, graceful movement. It’s a move she knows will be replayed and cut down into moving images and posted all over the Capitol.

Four falls onto her stomach, screaming bloody murder, and Cashmere smirks and puts her boot on the side of the other girl’s head. She can dispatch her now, in a civilized manner, a quick snap of the neck and she’d look like the angel of mercy.

She kneels down, hands on either side of Four’s head and a knee on her neck. A hair’s breadth from Four’s sharp face. Smiles. Says nothing until Four speaks in a ragged whisper.

“You want me to beg?” she rasps. “Ask you to kill me? Give me a quick death? You want that?”

Cashmere raises an eyebrow and picks up the knife again, making a show out of running the blade width-ways along Four’s cheekbone, smearing her with her own blood. “It would make an awfully nice show,” she says, voice sweet like sugar venom. “That’s what you’ve been trying for all this time, haven’t you?”

Four appears to summon the last bit of strength she can. Then, with a final effort, she spits in Cashmere’s face.

She’s dead before she can close her mouth.

Somewhere above, there’s a cannon, and the wind of a hovercraft. Cashmere feels nothing but the white light of victory.

 

*

 

This is how the fame starts.

She wakes up in the hospital bed, still groggy from the sedatives with needles in her arms and a scar healing along her ribs, one she doesn’t remember earning.

At the Closing Ceremonies, her dress is iridescent, constantly changing colors and shapes as she giggles and twirls. The color and opacity of an opal. Her birthstone, says the stylist, and then has to explain what a birthstone is. They play the national anthem and Snow shakes her hand and clasps it a little too tight and she smells blood and roses, a familiar scent. It’s hers. The whole nation is hers because she never asked questions and she never said no.

Her Victory Tour, they say, is uninspiring. She discovers the joys of expensive drinks, first wine and then cocktails that come in as many colors as the gems her district is known for. When she gets off the train in One, she cranes her neck looking for Gloss. He doesn’t have to go into the Games now. She has the house in the Victor’s Village, she can take care of him forever. She wants to grab him tight and never let him go, the brother her parents let slip away so long ago.

She doesn’t find out until after the dinner with the Mayor that he’s already deep in residential prep, and that he has accepted the Academy’s bid to become the following year’s tribute.

 

*

 

Aloysius May, Head Gamemaker and a celebrity in his own right, is her first client. She doesn’t know what’s happening when they take her to this party, escorted by a Peacekeeper in a silver Capitol uniform rather than the standard District whites. They tell her to circulate and she doesn’t ask questions, simply does, a drink in hand and her pink dress cut low.

“Well, hello, baby,” a strange man says, and presses his hand against her upper thigh, running along the curve of her buttocks. She doesn’t flinch; she’s no stranger to being touched by strangers. They make casual comments in front of her all night, regarding the shape of her body and its capabilities, and when Aloysius finally has her alone in his room upstairs, he pours her a drink. She takes it eagerly. It isn’t so bad. He’s handsome, in a certain light. 

“What do you like, Mr. May?” she mumbles, unsure of herself even yet, and as he answers she takes another swig of her drink to steel her nerves. He presses a kiss against her lips and she thinks of her family.

 

*

 

It’s not as if she didn’t know it would come to this. It’s an open secret in the Academy, what happens to the victors who trade on their looks. She has borrowed from the Capitol, sold lust to save her own life, and now she must repay them in kind. But it’s supposed to be an honor. Another chapter in a life of Service to the Capitol. This is their duty. The runts from the outer districts could never hack it. Better Ones and Fours than Elevens and Twelves. She tells herself this when the face of a twelve-year-old from Eight swims before her eyes.

When Gloss wins his Games, she’s not watching. She’s drunk, pinned beneath a sponsor, giving him what he wants to save her brother’s life. She’s drunk all the time. Curiously, no one seems to mind.

 

*

 

Gloss strokes her hair and holds it back when she vomits up everything she’s eaten and the pills she’s taken that day.

She does the same for him.

The beautiful people take care of their own.

 

*

 

The parties never end. The drugs are fantastic. She mixes pills with liquor more and more often, and it’s like being back at the Academy, daring Dexter to snap her neck on the sparring mat and knowing that he could do it and he might. She has nothing to lose but her penthouse apartment and her jewelry, made by the Academy wash-outs in One, and the perfume and lingerie and the closetful of obscene costumes she wears every day.

There’s a reason why there are few female mentors in One, she learns. It’s because by the time a girl Victor is cleared to mentor, they’re usually all too strung out on morphling and jacko and all the synthetic amphetamines their bodies can buy. She resists, or at least she tries; doesn’t do the hard stuff except when she’s paid to and takes the opiates Johanna recommended to avoid an OD. She spars with Gloss every morning, doesn’t allow her reflexes to become weak and atrophied. If she has to be a victim, she won’t be a willing one.

She mentors once, because she’s forced to. She lets the girl die. She knows the girl is better off. The girl is killed by a Twelve. It’s nothing of consequence, until suddenly it is.

 

*

 

The Quell notice comes to the Victor’s Village on an off weekend, when they’ve taken the train back to One to give their shared condolences to her dead tribute’s family. The Twos probably got it before them, but One is lucky they’ve gotten advance warning at all.

There is a discussion at the Academy, in one of the upstairs meeting rooms usually kept locked and available only to trainers. Cashmere has never been inside one of these rooms before. The assembled Victors are all of a similar type, good-looking and charismatic (or at least, they were at one point). She pulls the sleeves of her simple grey shirt down to cover her fists, concealing the fading track marks from the Closing Ceremonies weekend and the scars along her knuckles. Gloss sits beside her, the faint freckles on the bridge of his nose barely visible in the dim fluorescent light. As she steals a look at him, something churns in her throat, and she swallows.

_It isn’t fair._ This is all she can think, irrational a fragment as it is. Life isn't fair, boo hoo, they're the lucky ones. 

_It was never fair._

 

*

 

In Cashmere’s house in the Village, they fight through the adrenaline and the shakes. She’s off her game today and he pins her within the first thirty seconds. They’ve heard that in Two, the others do this with their mentors. She thinks of sparring with her own mentor, his face stretched tight and plasticky and his hair cut in the feathered style popular in the Capitol clubs, and shudders internally every time. It’s better with Gloss. They’re better together.

She doesn’t mean to hit him quite as hard as she does, but her elbow makes square contact with his nose, and as blood gushes, she gasps. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I swear to Snow, I'm so sorry.”

He grimaces. Tilts his head forward. “It’ll be fine.” Grabs for a spare dish towel, presses it to his nose. When he looks back at her, it’s with a different urgency, and when he speaks, it’s lower, more serious than his normal tone.

“We go in together. We die together.”

Cashmere stares at her brother, with blood streaming from his nose, staining the perfect teeth paid for in others’ blood so long ago. He is her mirror, they are two halves of a greater whole.

“If we go in together –” She grits her teeth and inhales sharply. “Can you promise that… we’ll go together?”

He quirks a smile. “Haven’t we always?”

 

*

 

In the moment directly after Gloss falls to the ground, an arrow buried in his temple, a curious thought strikes Cashmere: do you ever stop being someone’s sister? You can stop having a sibling, perhaps, but it isn’t as if he’s ceased to have ever existed – he just simply _isn’t _anymore.__

__Half of another thought crosses her mind as well, of the promise he made her before the Reaping, and she’s about to finish the thought when something hits her in the chest and suddenly there’s nothing._ _

__

___fin._ _ _


End file.
